Insiders have shared YouTube’s playbook for handling the Gaza crisis. They argue that it shows inconsistent enforcement.
Google’s doomed social network Buzz led US regulators to force Google and Meta to monitor their own data use. Insiders say the results were mixed, as pressure mounts for a federal privacy law.
YouTube's revenue sharing for creators and other Google services are shut off or hard to access for people in Palestinian territories. That digital divide is under new scrutiny as war ravages Gaza.
Google, Meta, and others test their algorithms for bias using standardized skin tone scales. Sony says those tools ignore the yellow and red hues at work in human skin color.
Axon Enterprise is best known for its electroshock Taser device that immobilizes criminal suspects. Less familiar: what one-time staffers describe as an all-in culture, in which some felt pressed to be tased before onlookers, get permanently inked with company tattoos, or join a stock plan that left some in the lurch. Axon says it never pressures employees to do any of these things.
Axon CEO Rick Smith claims his highly successful Taser company was inspired by the death of two school friends gunned down years ago. But much of the tale is false, Reuters found, part of a pattern of misrepresentations and self-serving behavior among top Axon executives.
The education company is a case study in generative AI’s disruptive power. Now it’s trying to prove it can beat back ChatGPT with an in-house chatbot.
America's tech giants are taking a modern-day crash course in India's ancient caste system, with Apple (AAPL.O) emerging as an early leader in policies to rid Silicon Valley of a rigid hierarchy that's segregated Indians for generations.
Facial recognition is making a comeback in the United States as bans to thwart the technology and curb racial bias in policing come under threat amid a surge in crime and increased lobbying from developers.
A few companies have begun counting what happens when employees boot up computers at home, turn up gas furnaces and ignore the world's most energy-efficient corporate campuses. It turns out that home setups popularized by the pandemic are eroding some of the climate benefit of abandoned commutes.
Reported here for the first time, their vetoes and the deliberations that led to them reflect a nascent industry-wide drive to balance the pursuit of lucrative AI systems with a greater consideration of social responsibility.
Several U.S. banks have started deploying camera software that can analyze customer preferences, monitor workers and spot people sleeping near ATMs, even as they remain wary about possible backlash over increased surveillance, more than a dozen banking and technology sources told Reuters.
Alphabet Inc’s Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists’ papers by launching a “sensitive topics” review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications and interviews with researchers involved in the work.
Google’s bet on balloons to deliver cell service soon faces a crucial test amid doubts about the viability of the technology by some potential customers.
Over the past year, a team of as many as 260 contract workers in Hyderabad, India has ploughed through millions of Facebook Inc photos, status updates and other content posted since 2014.
Google has a new cloud computing boss and big ambitions to someday produce more revenue from that business than from advertising. Now comes the hard part: winning over big-spending customers.
Such demonstrations of player activism in the last few years have e-sports management not sweating through the typical corporate nightmares about unionization, but instead dreaming about a future with players’ associations.
There are signs that these start-ups, like many supplement companies before them, leave out key facts and overstate health claims.
a key feature — user reviews of pot businesses — may be tainted by thousands of potentially fraudulent comments, a flaw in the company's software revealed.
Vizio, which recently agreed to sell itself to Chinese mega-firm LeEco for $2 billion in cash, doesn't require vendors to comply with a formal code of conduct — a common industry practice defining a company's labor and environmental standards.
Months after Susan Tully and friends bought a pair of professional video game teams for an estimated $1 million, her four-man “Call of Duty” squad finished its season in 11th out of 12 places. A loss in a post-season gunfight would relegate Tully’s H2K squad to the second-tier league. There, exposure and sponsor interest would dissolve.
When graphic designers at children's tablet and app maker Fuhu Inc. put up a Christmas tree with wacky ornaments for the holidays, an executive ripped them off and trashed them.
Two ex-Facebook employees founded the nonprofit Integrity Institute to clean up tech platforms. Now it’s reeling amid fights on Slack and one founder’s resignation after an external HR investigation.
Jalon Hall was featured on Google’s corporate social media accounts “for making #LifeAtGoogle more inclusive!” She says the company discriminated against her on the basis of her disability and race.
Social media algorithms usually promote biases toward white, thin bodies. Pinterest is using machine learning to surface images of all shapes and sizes.
It all started when Rohan Suri created an app at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, to tell his mom to leave home for the bus stop when he was seven minutes away. As the Ebola epidemic ravaged western Africa at the time, Suri and schoolmate Claire Scoggins connected the dots between tracking apps and contact tracers who ask patients whom they may have spread viruses to.
Unilever bought into the idea that Dollar Shave Club could sell more lucrative products than razors and that it could win over consumers abroad. But the initial results of what’s expected to be a multiyear transition — Act Two, as Dubin calls it — have been underwhelming, according to two sources familiar with the company but unauthorized to discuss it.
On its ascent to becoming the nation’s fastest-growing start-up, Loot Crate Inc. fostered a workplace in which employees warred with Nerf guns, proudly brandished Captain America socks and chanted the company’s name like a rally cry. But by last summer, when the Los Angeles firm landed on the cover of Inc. magazine for its stupendous expansion, the enthusiasm had been zapped.
If booming sales, expanding offices and a parade of TV commercials hadn’t put Jamie Siminoff on the radar of the home security industry, an early March incident certainly did.
Relative to Spiegel, Murphy is an unknown entity publicly. He's rarely seen or heard from outside the research and development teams he leads as chief technology officer. The few people willing to discuss him describe him as quiet, unpretentious and stoic.
Spiegel’s view of social media is decidedly different from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is six years older. But with Facebook racing to catch up, Spiegel is challenging investors to shell out for young and cool at the expense of safe and mainstream.
Blizzard Entertainment spent millions of dollars and more than five years designing a vast, ambitious video game only to realize that it wasn't fun. The project, code-named Titan, "utterly, completely and miserably" failed, according to the guy who ran it, veteran designer Jeffrey Kaplan.
An army of more than 60,000 unpaid moderators has unprecedented power over Reddit. The company’s future hinges on whether they can coexist with Wall Street’s expectations.
ChatGPT-style AI can tackle the drudge work of responding to RFPs faster than humans. Sales teams at Google, Twilio, and others say productivity is spiking.
Fearing the company’s new management, researchers frantically completed studies on misinformation and algorithmic bias, then published them online.
Companies like Google have offered a muted response to unrest in Iran. Grassroots coders are tackling internet censorship on their own.
Ukrainians working at Western tech companies are banding together to help their besieged homeland, aiming to knock down disinformation websites, encourage Russians to turn against their government, and speed delivery of medical supplies.
Video conferencing services have for years boasted that their technology is “intuitive” to use or “integrated” to function with other tools, but now vendors such as Google and Cisco can hardly go a blog post without trumpeting a different attribute: “inclusive.”
Walmart Inc, Best Buy Co Inc and hundreds of smaller retailers are bolstering their online gift features, hoping to challenge Amazon.com Inc's dominance as a seller of holiday gifts to homebound shoppers.
Providing the entertainment for the home-bound are software developers such as Jackson Owens who maintain free copycats of the games. Their obscure websites exploded in usage last month when social distancing measures locked Europeans and Americans at home and forced them to take dinner parties and happy hours online.
Locked out of practice fields because of coronavirus-related restrictions, Olympic softball players this week began turning their homes into training centers and preparing to lean on smartphone apps for virtual coaching.
On a busy day, contract employees in India monitoring nudity and pornography on Facebook and Instagram will each view 2,000 posts in an eight-hour shift, or almost four a minute.
The hilarity and absurdity of those images has turned Bitmoji into one of the most-downloaded apps in the world, and its illustrations have taken over text-messaging threads and Snapchat conversations. They’ve become such an important form of self-expression that it’s common to encounter people like Desai, who regularly update their Bitmoji avatars to reflect new hairdos and fashion choices.
The strategy could reflect Snap's acknowledgement that additional Venice development would blunt the creative diversity and bohemian vibrancy that drew it to the locale five years ago. Snap doesn't comment on real estate, but says it strives to be a friendly neighbor. It has donated to local programs for the homeless and arts education.
It's among the accommodations event spaces across the country are making in bids to capitalize on the rise of arena-packing video-game contests, which they hope will attract a new generation of event-goers -- and with them increased ticket and concession sales.
The celebrity entourage has a new member.
Some cyclists want the account's jewels stripped, arguing that people connected to cheating deserve no rewards, even in cyberspace. Alternatives they've suggested include leaving a syringe emoji next to the account's profile photo in perpetuity.
The fast-moving game of five-player teams is taking over tennis and volleyball courts. Costing 10% of a soccer field, a futsal court is also a bargain for parks officials.
It's not unsual for a representative to negotiate for clients vying for the same position. The case of USC football coaches Ed Orgeron and Steve Sarkisian is an example.
By deferring some earnings, athletes can help themselves and their teams. But problems can occur.
Little by little, Protestants and Catholics are coming together to form integrated teams, although tensions in their communities still run high.
Although many observers have noted the impact of secularization and child abuse scandals on church membership and finances, only now are the Irish seeing the cultural and socioeconomic reverberations. These include a class of people willing to observe life’s most significant milestones outside the church.
From its founding, OpenAI said its governing documents were available to the public. When WIRED requested copies after the company’s boardroom drama, it declined to provide them.
Videos obtained by WIRED from public transit vehicles reveal self-driving cars causing delays and potential danger to buses, trains, and passengers.
Public records seen by Reuters show Cruise with its computers in control suffered 34 accidents involving bodily harm or over $1,000 in damage across nearly 3 million miles of driving during a four-year span ended May 2021.
ID.me in a year has gone from vetting unemployment claimants in zero states to 27, to help address what the U.S. government said could amount to $87 billion in improper unemployment benefits payments during the pandemic. Many of those states have exercised "emergency" or "sole-source" exemptions to skip getting competing bids, according to records Reuters reviewed from 11 agencies.
When election officials in at least 29 U.S. counties face an expected avalanche of mail-in ballots in the Nov. 3 presidential election due to the coronavirus pandemic, they will not rely on eyes alone to verify voters’ signatures.
Facebook Inc’s struggles with hate speech and other types of problematic content are being hampered by the company’s inability to keep up with a flood of new languages as mobile phones bring social media to every corner of the globe.
Frank and Wanda Leppell once lived on a quiet cattle ranch in the middle of a rolling prairie, the lowing of cattle and the chirping of sparrows forming a pleasant soundtrack to their mornings. No more.
On a dirt road near Palmdale Boulevard, the isolated 800-square-foot house is surrounded by more snake holes than trees and there is barely a footprint in the soft sand.